Yanmen Pass lies in the Yanmen mountains of Dai County, in Xinzhou, about twenty kilometres north of the county seat, and the road to it climbs through country that narrows as it goes. The pass has more than one name: it was also called Xijing Pass, and in the system of wall passes it is counted with Ningwu and Pianguan as one of the outer three. What it holds is a corridor between the valleys of central Shanxi and the grassland of the steppe, and that is why a wall was carried through it. The first line here is dated to 557, under the Northern Qi. Everything standing above ground today is later: the fortifications a visitor walks through are Ming.
From the journal
Yanmen Pass: A Gate in the Frontier Wall
The pass in the Yanmen mountains north of Dai County: the corridor it controls, the Ming fort town of 1374 that stands there now, its three gatehouses, and the morning in 1937 that the gap was fought over.
In the same city · Xinzhou ↗The gap in the mountains
What stands there today
In 1374, the seventh year of Hongwu, the Ming commander Lu Xiang, Marquis of Ji'an, repaired the old pass and then built a new fort town five kilometres to the east, and that town is the core of the site. Its wall stands ten metres high and runs about a kilometre around. The construction is the northern mixture: a base of stone, a core of rammed earth, a facing of brick, and battlements along the top. Three gatehouses remain, named Dili in the west, Yanmen in the middle and Tianxian in the east. Nearby, the Ming wall at Baicaokou runs 5,033 metres and stands six to eight metres high. The pass was listed as a national key cultural relic in 2001 and rated a 5A scenic area in 2017.
Why passes gather stories
A pass is a place where a road is forced to be narrow, and stories collect in such places because everyone who crossed had to come through the same gap. Yanmen's record runs from a wall line of 557 to a Ming rebuilding of 1374, and it includes a morning in the war. On 18 October 1937, during the fighting around Xinkou, a regiment of the Eighth Route Army under He Bingyan ambushed Japanese troops at the pass. It is the kind of action a pass attracts: a small fight at a choke point, remembered longer than larger battles fought on open ground. Walk the kilometre of rampart and the point of the place is plain, since whoever holds the gap decides who passes and on what terms.